Updated 24 February 2026 at 13:15 IST
Elon Musk Accuses Anthropic Of 'Stealing Training Data' Amid Distillation Attack Fears
"Anthropic is guilty of stealing training data at massive scale and has had to pay multi-billion-dollar settlements for their theft. This is just a fact," Elon Musk tweeted.
After AI major Anthropic accused DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax to launch industrial-scale distillation attacks on it its models, Tesla CEO Elon Musk noted that Anthropic is also guilty of stealing training data at massive scale.
"Anthropic is guilty of stealing training data at massive scale and has had to pay multi-billion-dollar settlements for their theft. This is just a fact," Elon Musk tweeted.
This came after Anthropic claimed that DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude, extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own models.
What Are ‘Distillation Attacks’ in AI?
Distillation is a well-known method where less capable model is trained on outputs of a more advanced system, but Anthropic argues that this leads to replications of advanced capabilities at significantly lower cost
Further, the San-Fransico headquartered firm noted, "Distillation can be legitimate: AI labs use it to create smaller, cheaper models for their customers. But foreign labs that illicitly distill American models can remove safeguards, feeding model capabilities into their own military, intelligence, and surveillance systems."
"These attacks are growing in intensity and sophistication. Addressing them will require rapid, coordinated action among industry players, policymakers, and the broader AI community," it said.
Meanwhile, the community note exchanges raised eyebrows only on the working of Dario Amodei led Anthropic.
"Anthropic settled a $1.5B lawsuit for pirating 7M+ books from shadow libraries to train Claude and faces a $3B suit for torrenting 20,000+ songs. They built their models on stolen creative work, then complain when others extract their outputs," as per a community note shared by Musk.
This comes after Anthropic AI, generative AI firm, agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by a group of authors last year.
"This landmark settlement will be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history," the settlement motion said, while batting for "meaningful compensation" to authors, setting a precedent of AI companies paying for their use of pirated websites.
Published By : Nitin Waghela
Published On: 24 February 2026 at 13:14 IST